Good News: Wanna Get Away?

We’ve probably all the seen the Southwest commercials involving an embarrassing moment followed by an invitation to go on a trip far away. I’ve had several of these moments in my life but a few seem to come to mind more readily. In college, I worked at the library and over the course of a semester starting getting the warm fuzzes over a coworker. We didn’t know much about each other outside of the work sphere but one day I wanted that to change. I decided to ask her on a date. The library was about a five-minute walk from my frat house so the whole time I’m giving myself a pep talk to keep moving my feet in the direction of the library. Everything in me wants to about face and retreat. I enter through the library doors and head down the hallway to the circulation desk; the point of no return. In awkward fashion, I blurt out the rehearsed lines and what happens next far surpasses any nightmare imaginable.

It’s way too embarrassing for me to share in a newspaper article so you’ll have to ask me the next time I see you. Just kidding! Her boyfriend was standing just down the counter from our conversation so she says, “that’s really nice of you to ask me on a date but I’ve already got a boyfriend. Would you like to meet him?” Unbelievable! Talk about a wanna get away moment!

We’ve all got those wanna get away moments that we can look back on now and laugh but some are much more painful. Moments or even seasons when our lives are such a wreck we’d rather just get away. Maybe it’s a father facing the long drive home after losing a job or a high school student battling depression that never seems to end? It’s in those moments we just wanna get away.

If this is where we find ourselves today there’s some good news. We’ve all experienced wrecks in our lives. The metaphorical kind of wrecks that are sometimes self-induced but other times not. In either case, we see time and again in the Bible that God is an expert in redeeming wrecks. God rarely goes after the squeaky clean because wrecks bring out our need. Something we as humans have a hard time admitting. Let me give you a prime example.

After a 40 year timeout in the desert, God mobilizes His people, Israel, to occupy a new land. It’s a big mission that will alter the course of human history. Right as it begins God does something surprising. He flips the script and tells the story through the eyes of a Gentile prostitute named Rahab. Talk about someone who had made a wreck of things and yet God looks down and offers her the opportunity for redemption. Rahab’s not a passive participant though. She takes a step of risky faith by aligning with God and His people in the face of imminent danger and the rest as they say is history.

We love the wreck to redemption story but the question becomes are we willing to take a step of risky faith? God loves to redeem wrecks but chooses to operate in the realm of our risky faith. If you find yourself in a place today that you never expected and don’t know what to do, consider it an opportunity for God to redeem through risky faith. Whether self-induced or not God’s an expert in redeeming wrecks and He does so in the realm of our risky faith.